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Only a Prodigy could solve this MadMaze! [2400 Baud OK] Table of Contents Introduction: Weith Village & The Rules Level One: Into The Maze Level One: Sage Wisdom, Wicked Witches, & Internet Trolls Circa 1990 Level One: Where The Fantastic Beasts Find YOU Level One: The Vilest Beast Is Man...ners Level One: A Maze Of A Different Sort Level One: Break Time? But We Only Just Started! Level One: The Lady & The Lists Level One: The Elf-King & The Black Knight Level One: Beauty & A Beast Level One: Baby's First Logic Puzzle Level One: Gonzaga, Part 1 Level One: Gonzaga, Part 2 Level One: Castle Perilous, The Approach Level One: Castle Perilous, Within Level One: Castle Perilous, Valterre Level One: Castle Perilous, King Carlon Level Two: Recurrence Level Two: The Ghosts of Al-Mugabi Level Two: Meeting The Locals Level Two: The Second Voyage, Part 1 Level Two: The Second Voyage, Part 2 Level Two: This Will End Well Level Two: The Best Worst Possible Outcome Level Two: Temple Of The Mad One Level Two: The Wrong River Level Two: Multiplayer Features Level Two: A Plain Hint Level Two: One Bazaar Encounter After Another Level Two: Only One Right Answer Level Two: The Burning River Level Two: Separating The Sheep From The Goats Level Two: Dated References Level Two: Digestive Problems Level Two: My Cousin Is A Blacksmith, In Fact Level Two: Our Foe, The Whirlwind Level Two: Our Pal, The Whirlwind Level Two: Citadel of Osmet Khan, Outskirts Level Two: Citadel of Osmet Khan, Within Level Two: Citadel of Osmet Khan, Mighty Hassan Level Two: Citadel of Osmet Khan, Three Trials Level Two: Citadel of Osmet Khan, The Talisman Level Three: Everything Old Is New Again Level Three: A Different Sort Of Snake Charmer Level Three: Trouble Brewing Level Three: Out Of The Geyser And Into The Fire Level Three: AirBnB Level Three: The Frozen Lands Level Three: My Dad, The Whale Level Three: Bears, Stars, And One Rat-Bastard Dragon Level Three: An Ice Wizard Level Three: Old Friends Return (Bearing Puzzles) Level Three: One Dumb Lizard, One Dumber Knight Level Three: A Dapper Proposition Level Three: Matilda's Final Task Level Three: Bugs, Berries, And Other Wildlife Level Three: It's Still Kinda Racist If They're Catmen Level Three: A Wizard Knight Intervenes In A Battle Between Pterodactyl-Riding Insects And Airship-Piloting Lizardmen, And This Is Getting A Bit Long But I Really Couldn't Leave Any Of That Out Level Three: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Herpetarium Level Three: Sugar Cravings Level Three: A Wizard (Of The Kitchen) Level Three: How The Prime Mother Got Her Groove Back Level Three: Our New Pal Level Three: This Place Is Rigged To Blow Level Three: Over The Edge, Into Madness Level Four: Its Own Little World Level Four: Catching Up Level Four: Getting Our Paperwork In Order Level Four: A Test Of General Reasoning Level Four: The Final Stretch Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, Arrival Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, Colors Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, Unexpected Obstacles Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, Never Meet Your Heroes Level Four: The Stuff Of Madness, A Sacrifice For Sanity Post-Mortem: The Prodigious Question Of MadMaze Just What Is MadMaze? At the dawn of the 1990s, the online service Prodigy decided to branch out a bit. Prodigy had been trying to distinguish itself from other online services with its powerful (for the time) graphical user interface, which let them do something that others couldn't: Online gaming. Games were developed to use the Prodigy service itself as a user interface, providing users with games they didn't need to install to play and offering features like saves stored on Prodigy's servers. Most of these games were novelties. They didn't actually take advantage of the fact that they were "online" in the sense we understand today. With 2400 Baud modems considered high-end for the consumer market, there just wasn't enough bandwidth to offer features like multiplayer on Prodigy's service. These games were, in essence, proto-browser games, hamstrung by technical limitations and the service's UI. But then there was MadMaze. The game saw many thousands of players, proving itself quite a hit among Prodigy's then-impressive roll of under a million users. Nostalgia still follows the game, but it seems to take the form of vague memories more than a clear recollection, as the Prodigy service no longer exists and the game has been thought to be lost. I'd like to change that for the old crowd, and to introduce to everyone else one of the weirdest footnotes in adventure and online gaming history.  MadMaze is a game in two parts. In one part, the player navigates a series of mazes, presented in a faux-3D format. Periodically, the player encounters a "Place of Power," which provides a text-based continuation of the storyline in a Choose Your Own Adventure (or Visual Novel, I suppose) format. Navigate the encounter or solve the puzzle presented and one can proceed. Do especially well and a clue might even be presented for later Places of Power. Fail and die miserably, requiring a reloaded save or starting all over. Starting all over was bad. MadMaze is not a short game. MadMaze has all the same limitations that other early "online" games did. There's no multiplayer. The graphics are weak even by the standards of the era -- this game is the same age as the original Warcraft, but looks ten years older -- due to the limitations of the graphical protocol used by Prodigy at the time. There's only one feature that takes advantage of the fact that the player has an internet connection. Why would this game provoke nostalgia where similar games did not? The biggest reason is that, for all its limitations, the game is remarkably well-written and well-made. Though simplistic in design the game is long and varied, with well over a hundred Places of Power filled with fiendish puzzles, quirky characters, gruesome deaths, late 80s memes, and wit. The story is a sort of generic fantasy journey, epic in scope, that grows on you (and itself) as you go. The art by Mark Zweigler, who regrettably passed away shortly after finishing, has a certain weird charm to it that helps it transcend the obvious limitations of the medium.  But perhaps more important, the game's concept and script come from the team of Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan. Goldberg and Costikyan had previously worked on a pleasant role-playing adventure about hapless clones and Friend Computer. Yes, Paranoia. Perhaps it has now become clear what kind of game this is. I did mention "gruesome deaths," didn't I? Costikyan (who has been critical of the game since) also worked on West End Games's Star Wars roleplaying game, and developed TOON for Steve Jackson Games with... Warren Spector. Everything I do seems to come back to Warren Spector, doesn't it? MadMaze is a game that is nostalgic for me, and I'm not the only one. The game regrettably was discontinued by Prodigy in 1999, but survives as a Java-based browser game (nicknamed MadMaze-II) through the efforts of the late Russell Brown and Vintage Computing admin Benj Edwards, whose site hosts the only working build of the game that I know of, for a certain definition of "working". I also possess a copy of MadMaze-II, but Brown intentionally obscured everything to make it difficult to cheat and I'm not a Java wizard to have the slightest idea how he did it, so I have no idea how to make it operational and am using the data solely to grab the art and such. Thanks to Brown's work in saving the game, I'm able to present this bit of ancient PC gaming history in its entirety (minus a few quirks, which I'll explain as we get to them). This will be a comprehensive screenshot LP. While a lot of text will simply be transcribed (as most of the game is text), we'll see all the graphics, all the Places of Power, every maze, every puzzle, and most idiotic demises. And there're a lot of all of those. Spoilers should be tagged if possible, but if I ask for information or clues that might've been forgotten by all means feel free to bring them up in devising a solution to a puzzle. The game can at times be quite obscure in offering hints one time many hours before they become relevant. And here's the first two posts! Introduction: Weith Village & The Rules Learn how the game works, and why we're engaged in the act of mazing madly. Level One: Into The Maze How an idiot solves rudimentary mazes, and how this idiot already did that for you. Join us next time when we solve an actual puzzle... if we're charitable in even calling it a puzzle. The game gives us a softball or two before hucking a fastball directly at our faces. Oh, and when I say "we're" solving a puzzle, I do mean that. You will be expected to show your work. For everything. Nakar fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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May 28, 2018 16:07
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Geomancing posted:The font instantly reminds me of back when my family used Prodigy for early online stuff. I never played the games, though. Mainly because... wait. Was this back when Prodigy still charged by the hour? So if this is a long game, you're actually investing a fairly large monetary amount to play. Mercifully, MadMaze-II is free, which is how I rediscovered it in college.
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May 28, 2018 17:03
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Level One: Sage Wisdom, Wicked Witches, & Internet Trolls Circa 1990 In which we die once, then put ourselves in a position to probably die again, because we're Remember: I'll count an alternate solution as valid if it gets us through the PoP without a game over. Zanzibar Ham posted:I wonder what message you're carrying for that Moraziel fellow, prolly something along the lines of 'hey, you're doing a pretty bad job, step it up guv' Fat Samurai posted:“I hear you need a new sacrifice to power up your ritual to stop the bad guy. Here, have a volunteer” idonotlikepeas posted:Oh, man, I remember this thing. There were a couple of puzzles I felt really proud of myself for solving as a lad. Really Pants posted:Somehow it's not quite the same without the ponderous screen loading. Nakar fucked around with this message at 18:01 on May 28, 2018 |
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May 28, 2018 17:58
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Adamant posted:Also, are you able to ask the crone about the troll if the sage didn't tell you about it?
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May 28, 2018 18:47
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ManxomeBromide posted:I'll give MadMaze this; this PoPs have no memory, it seems like unwinnability is impossible. The game does take steps to avoid being brute-forceable, but it can't make itself actually immune to the process. You can beat the entire game not reading a word of the text if you're willing to just keep trying every option permutation until it works, but later PoPs get complex enough that you can't easily do that.
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May 28, 2018 21:41
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Level One: Where The Fantastic Beasts Find YOU Wherein we encounter the first, and oh God not last, pure logic puzzle. So! My insinuation of alternate solutions didn't necessarily mean there was an alternate solution, but as it so happens there was one, and someone nailed it: curiousCat posted:Clearly we should just faint. Note that playing dead will not work on the Questing Beast. God help us all, we need to actually answer its riddle.
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May 29, 2018 17:36
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nweismuller posted:E: Curses! Beaten to the punch while I was typing out a full accounting of my work! DGM_2 posted:This puzzle is slightly ambiguous as it doesn't say that all the wars of conquest were successful. You have to assume that.
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May 29, 2018 18:13
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Wipfmetz posted:I need help on how to imagine the maze. There are narrow, walled hallways and then suddently there's a house in the middle of a forest. You follow some more hallways and then you arrive at a ... peasant plowing a wide field? The MadMaze is Castlevania, basically.
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May 29, 2018 22:33
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Level One: The Vilest Beast Is Man...ners In which we learn manners, and grammar, possibly in that order. We end on a puzzle. Kind of. It's more of a trivia question, I guess. DGM_2 posted:What's bugging me is those maps you're showing us. My brain keeps wanting to interpret them as 9*9 rather than 5*5. Whybird posted:So a thing I really want to comment on is the quality of the writing. It's terse, it gets to the point, and it's witty without beating you over the head with how witty it's being.
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May 30, 2018 00:05
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Zanzibar Ham posted:Is 'who cares' an option?  Almost.
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May 30, 2018 00:33
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Zereth posted:Please do at least once, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it as well.  I'll be trying gridlines on my maps as well as of next post. We'll see how that goes.
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May 30, 2018 11:34
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Level One: A Maze Of A Different Sort In which we get lost in the woods, twice. Regrettably, he takes some offense to the "pretentious squink" comment (or any other wrong answer) and escorts you from his property. Doesn't even kill you for it. Real missed opportunity.
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May 30, 2018 17:02
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Level One: Break Time? But We Only Just Started! In which we can die, but not in the places you'd expect. Guess that dagger's not so useless after all, if you don't mind it being the wrong solution.  Zereth posted:I suspect we don't actually have an inventory. I don't think anything is saved between Places of Power. If we gain a sword and use it later, it's because we did so in a non-optional manner in a mandatory place of power. EDIT: Believe it or not, we're halfway through the first level in terms of raw Places of Power. There are a total of 19. That said, they get longer pretty quickly, so in terms of raw content we're probably not quite halfway. Nakar fucked around with this message at 14:55 on May 31, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 14:53
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Level One: The Lady & The Lists In which we merrily avoid all potential dangers and then put ourselves in the most obvious danger we've ever been in before. ManxomeBromide posted:One of the interesting bits of setting up MadMaze as being this place of utter chaos is that you can put a character like the Woodsman in there and have him behave exactly like a cranky fantasy ranger and this ends up feeling like a relief to a tense situation as opposed to as an obvious cliche.
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Jun 1, 2018 14:14
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Level One: The Elf-King & The Black Knight In which we lose, then win the tournament in a single day. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Prove our valor, if this guy actually is a legit honorable knight he'll take off the armor and fight us fairly on foot.
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Jun 2, 2018 12:50
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Level One: Beauty & A Beast We meet a god and are forced to endure poetry, in that order, twice. Join us next time for what might actually be our first genuinely difficult puzzle unless, you know, you understand basic logic. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Can we say Tostien's name in later encounters or was that a 1-time deal?
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Jun 2, 2018 22:58
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Level One: Baby's First Logic Puzzle Seriously, this one was even easier than I remembered it being.
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Jun 3, 2018 16:53
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Zereth posted:A wizard did it. Or maybe the creature deserved it. He doesn't exactly remember, after all.
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Jun 3, 2018 18:22
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Level One: Gonzaga, Part 1 In which we encounter an old friend, if by "old" we mean we became friends a few PoPs ago. A bit short, but the PoP after this is the Castle Perilous, and it's comparatively gigantic, roughly three times the size and length of the longer preceding PoPs like the tournament. So that one's gonna take a few goes, and this one's technically a puzzle of sorts, so we'll split it in two and then hit up the castle in earnest after getting our peasant asses out of this latest fire.
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Jun 4, 2018 00:14
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Level One: Gonzaga, Part 2 In which we prove our honor, or don't, and pass on to the Castle Perilous. Those suggesting a chivalric response had the right idea; by getting Gonzaga to fight on our terms, we had a chance to actually best him. That being said, there is a solution that works quicker (in the sense of fewer selected actions), and one person nailed it: Qrr posted:He's not on a horse this time so we could probably run around him. He's in armor and we're not and it doesn't sound like he's standing at a choke point or anything. Of course that would ruin our relationship but the game doesn't track state so I'm sure it's fine.
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Jun 4, 2018 13:37
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh my God, I love that "run around the guy in full plate and laugh at him while you disappear into the horizon" is an option.
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Jun 4, 2018 15:16
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Level One: Castle Perilous, The Approach In which we fail to enter the Castle Perilous despite a brilliant plan or two, then cheat to make the game easier. Sorry about the shorter length here; we should be seeing a lot more stuff in the next few updates as the options spiral madly out of control. Another 2-3 updates, probably, just to clear this one PoP. First things first though, we gotta get inside. But how?
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Jun 5, 2018 00:33
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Qrr posted:Was there an option at the secret exit besides ambushing the guards, or was all that text given at the same time?
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Jun 5, 2018 06:22
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Level One: Castle Perilous, Within In which we get inside the castle, and also try all the other ways of getting inside the castle. Turns out that there weren't any alternate solutions for this one, which is too bad. Any time one could flee, however, one can escape the PoP safely and try again. Discretion the better part of valor and all that.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:21
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Level One: Castle Perilous, Valterre In which we do just about everything there is to do in the Castle Perilous except finish it. Join us next time when we finish the tutorial of MadMaze.  Oh I guess we have to kill a weird scorpion monster first, but I'm sure that won't be a problem.
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Jun 6, 2018 04:19
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Level One: Castle Perilous, King Carlon In which we level up enough to qualify for a class change. And that's the first level. Hopefully it's been of some interest, but if it hasn't, fear not: It's about to get considerably weirder. We'll be traveling from the vaguely Arthurian European myth setting into something right out of Arabian Nights with nothing but our wits. And our horse. And our vast riches. And a magic sword. But mostly our wits. ManxomeBromide posted:Also, "The Varnish Wars"? Was King Carlon deposed over a matter of furniture polish? Or does Sheltem's malevolence extend even to the MadMaze?
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Jun 6, 2018 13:31
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HardDiskD posted:Minor nitpick, though, I don't know if you are transcribing or have the text dump, but in the Level One: Gonzaga, Part 2 update, Gonzaga says: It isn't the only typo in the game if indeed it is one, I've just corrected the ones that obviously were (such as "also also" or other doublings up on words) and left this one because I had no idea what they were going for here. As for the puzzles, fear not. Once we get to some of the meatier ones I intend to offer more time to work them out rather than frantically posting past them. ManxomeBromide posted:I hope this means the Elder ends up assuming that we have failed. Our predecessor got, what, three months?
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Jun 6, 2018 17:44
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Level Two: Recurrence In which all that has happened before happens again, except different.
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Jun 7, 2018 14:01
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Level Two: The Ghosts of Al-Mugabi In which we hold out on a wild animal because we need to prove we're cool to some ghosts. Congratulations to ultrafilter for discovering the alternate solution! Truly, you are in touch with the Mad One himself to have chosen such an insane option. Next time: Our first actual puzzle of the level, and a surprise twist.
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Jun 8, 2018 12:59
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Level Two: Meeting The Locals In which we encounter a representative of each aspect of desert life, settled and nomadic, and acquire the aid of both -- for a price. To address an elephant in the room, so to speak: Yes, the game is effectively equating the Mad One worship with Islam, and it's a little uncomfortable even though it isn't trying to generalize that to the real world. It's tempered only by the fact that the writing is nuanced enough to assume that people are people first and that following the Mad One doesn't make you inherently evil, but it is still a wee bit uncomfortable. There will be additional such moments as we go, so I advise everyone to be aware of it and understand it in the context of its time and of the storybook-esque world being spun here. But let's get a nice distraction from that, shall we? In addition to the puzzle we've got to solve, we will be given an actual choice should we succeed! Makound will offer to lead us northeast, toward the Twisted Temple, or northwest, toward the River of Flames. He knows little of either destination, but says both are "many mazes from here." Depending on which route we choose, we will encounter entirely different mazes with their own distinct Places of Power. Remember that our ultimate goal on this level is the Citadel of Osmet Khan, but its location is unknown (Makound has no idea where it lies either). Neither of those destinations sounds much like it'd bring us any closer to our goal, and we didn't miss any information that would tell us which way to go, so choose whichever strikes your fancy more. Don't worry about missing out on content, as I have a plan for that.
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Jun 8, 2018 19:22
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Since there's a route split coming up, it occurred to me that all my little computer maps are unmarked and I have no idea which route is which and which PoPs show up in there in which order, so I had to go digging for some old reference material: No spoilers as this is the current map, but yeah I did this on graph paper for every single maze in the drat game. Anyway Twisted Temple is winning, so absent a significant interest to the contrary we'll be heading in its direction next, now that I remember exactly which way that is. ManxomeBromide posted:This implied to me at the time that Weith itself includes The Mad One as part of its core religious culture, but in this context it seems like our leader is directly stating that all mortals are ultimately on the same side. That said, he didn't do an awful lot to stop us from counter-overthrowing Timozel either (assuming he was even paying attention). The Mad One's favor doesn't seem to be worth much, though not because he's a weak god. If anything, he seems to be the most powerful god in the setting, as all The Lady has done is give us some hints. But he's certainly living up to his trickster reputation given his arbitrary abandonment of those he's previously empowered. Or maybe that's the way he likes it, and in that case... Nakar fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Jun 9, 2018 |
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Jun 9, 2018 04:51
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Level Two: The Second Voyage, Part 1 In which we just wanna roc. This isn't much of a puzzle, just fishing for alternate solutions. One reason for going through so many PoPs here is that there are fewer puzzles early on this route than I expected, and the ones that do exist are somewhat binary. So a bit of a longish update here. Note that despite what Makound said, we can't simply ask the Tercelid soldier where the palace is, even though he's doubly indebted to us and might know of its location. Not sure how they overlooked that one and didn't even provide an option to ask!
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Jun 9, 2018 14:16
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Level Two: The Second Voyage, Part 2 In which a number of extremely bad decisions compound themselves until we're about to jump naked off a cliff.
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Jun 9, 2018 18:55
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Level Two: This Will End Well In which we don't jump off a cliff, and go on to have many adventures as a result. Of course jumping was the wrong answer, it's always the wrong answer. Regrettably, we may not survive much longer if Matilda should happen to find out we're trying to cheat her out of her magic bird. But that's something we'll just have to deal with when it happens. And it will happen.
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Jun 10, 2018 14:54
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Level Two: The Best Worst Possible Outcome In which various things happen, then nothing happens. In the end, it was a good idea to just wash our hands of the whole affair, as ManxomeBromide noted. Though betraying them both just ends us with a goshawk that we can't really use. But hey, free bird, so there's that. Upon passing the whirlwind, we'll be in the Twisted Temple maze itself! This maze is a bit... unusual.  Whatever could this mean!? But we'll hit up the Temple first before we wrestle with weird asymmetries or multiple exits from the same maze.
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Jun 11, 2018 13:59
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Level Two: Temple Of The Mad One In which we get religion. Maybe a little too much religion. So perhaps unsurprisingly, we actually need to go to the River of Flames anyway! This time, at least, we have some purpose for doing so; had we gone there first, we'd have just passed it by and ended up on the route to the Twisted Temple, where we'd meet the shaman and have to go all the way back there. So in essence, this is the "optimal" path, as we've now got a way to get directly back to the shaman (and thus the temple) as soon as we've done what we need to do at the river. Of course, the shaman didn't bother to tell us anything about the intervening mazes leading to the river, nor how we're supposed to get him "the water of Flame" safely.  Skanker posted:If (when?) we meet her again she's gonna be in such a foul mood, better be careful! Seems like all those outcomes were designed to end with her mildly/severely angry at us.
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Jun 12, 2018 01:03
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Level Two: The Wrong River In which we at last encounter one of those puzzles.
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Jun 12, 2018 13:47
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Level Two: Multiplayer Features In which we help a snake learn logic, continue our bird vandalism spree, and try very hard not to meet a wizard.
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Jun 13, 2018 13:59
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Black Robe posted:It's redundant, all viziers are evil. Dragonatrix posted:Meeting a Houri at random was super unexpected and implies that the Messenger knight guy is actually for real dead.
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Jun 13, 2018 15:58
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Level Two: A Plain Hint In which the tables are turned, and then... unturned?
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Jun 14, 2018 16:29
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